The Wondering Years: How Pop Culture Helped Me Answer Life’s Biggest Questions

by Knox McCoy

Like a piñata, the ideas of Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny all exist to be eventually broken. And in a sense, whatever initial beliefs we are conscripted into function like that too. And while I don’t think the foundation of these beliefs are necessarily meant to be broken beyond repair like our belief, say, in the Easter Bunny, I do think we’re meant to break with the simplistic terms in which we understand these massively complicated ideas.

I was relieved to find out that God was just testing Abraham, but I wasn’t that relieved. The fact that I had been taken to the point of being relieved that God didn’t make a father murder his son limited the fullness of the relief I could experience. But I just told myself that they all probably had a huge LOL after the fact, did a freeze-frame group high five, and all lived (mostly) happily ever after—except, perhaps, for the PTSD Isaac had and the permanent dread associated with his having lost faith in his father as a caregiver. But other than

On a fundamental level, I loved God. But on that same level, I also wasn’t 100 percent sure I could trust him.8 And why should I, when every story I was hearing made him out to be an omnipotent super villain with a penchant for wrath, flood, and fire?

There’s nothing holy or redeeming in a choice out of fear of the alternative. Even if that did seem to jibe with the God I was learning about in Sunday school—a God who seemed to use fear as his go-to tactic—there was discord in my soul about wondering whether this was what my interpretation of God should really be. It’s the same kind of dissonance we all feel when God is misrepresented by those advocating on behalf of corrosive and hateful things.

our culture is hungry for receipts; people want proof on whether Christianity is truly a faith of hope and love—or a wolf in hope and love’s clothing. That’s why we Christians have a serious problem if we aren’t consistently demonstrating which it is through the fruit of our actions.

As always, when motivations spring from a place of fear, missteps follow shortly thereafter. Consider Frozen’s Queen Elsa, who is terrified of the powers that make her special and lives by the motto “Conceal, don’t feel.” She defines herself by what not to do (because that’s all she’s ever been taught), and in this way, she becomes less a person and more a wintry nuclear bomb, dangerous to both herself and others. Clearly, it just doesn’t work to orient our lives this way.

Alongside giving disproportionate respect to carnival food and being unable to understand why continuing to fly the Confederate flag is a terrible idea, sports and sanctification are close siblings at the tippy top of the Southern caste system.

I always felt bad for the drummer who left Hootie & the Blowfish to become a youth pastor right before they became huge, but I felt even worse for the person who would be conscripted into demonic villainy.

Those books have a lot of issues, but their naming of the Antichrist is perfection. It did have the unintended consequence of turning an entire generation of readers from the American South against any moderately attractive European man for fear that he was the camouflaged Antichrist. I’m serious—if you are from the South and read those books and don’t find yourself being intensely skeptical of Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, and Daniel Craig, you are a trillion percent lying.

They say a good collegiate athletic director always has a piece of paper listing the five coaches he would try to hire if his current one left. Well, that was me, but with the Antichrist.

The road to hell is flanked by a great many things. But most prominently, by Christians talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Getting married in college is like a movie studio casting their movie with Lindsay Lohan. It might work out. Truly, it could. But it probably won’t. Fortunately for me, it did. I consider Ashley’s and my marriage to be the Mean Girls of Lindsay Lohan’s IMDB. But I know a great many others that turned out to be Herbie: Fully Loaded.